On Marriage and the Priesthood

Part of the purpose of this blog is to be able to comment on articles/opinion pieces in the paper that I want to “talk back to” and there was one that fit this category in today’s Tribune: “Allow Catholic priests to marry; ‘I would have been a good priest.'” is the title in the online version of the story. (As usual, I can’t tell if this is publically available or behind a paywall that cookies let me past, but you can search for de vinck priest to find it.)

(The one by Steven Chapman was a doozy, too — there’s no way to stop illegal immigration without infringing on our liberties, so the Tea Party should just suck it up and accept it as a permanent part of our country. But I digress.)

The piece itself starts off with the author’s love of the Catholic church and its rituals growing up as a child in the 50s and 60s, and his desire to emulate the “good priest” of the movies of that time, and his genuine desire to minister in the ways that priests did, and do — baptisms, hearing confessions, ministering to people’s spiritual needs. But he couldn’t accept the requirement for celibacy, so became a teacher and married.

But here’s what bugs me: not that he felt that he personally could not forgo married life, but that he writes that being unmarried or lacking a sexual relationship more generally means “giv[ing] up what it means to be a man. . . suffer[ing] . . . repressed sexual passions and [being] lonely.” He believes that being unmarried means to “suffer debilitating loneliness for his entire life” and to “reject what it means to be a human being, suffer; isolate yourself from physical love, marriage and children.”

Now, I know that he’s not alone in believing that sexual relationships are psychologically or even physiologically necessary, but how insulting to single people everywhere to categorically state that they suffer debilitating loneliness! I have a sister who never married, and who has reached the point where it’s unlikely that she will marry, based on probabilities alone, so perhaps I take particular offense on her behalf.

Funny — the old line about “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” (while pretty awful to the extent that this has transformed into “kids don’t need fathers”) does have some truth to it!